The Somali Civil War is an ongoing, now three-decades-long outburst of violence that has displaced millions and killed thousands. The international public knows about this conflict primarily through news headlines generated by the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” incident and its eponymous 2001 Hollywood movie depiction. However, the global media otherwise paid little attention to the state of affairs following the 1995 UN withdrawal from a still war-torn Somalia. A Fading Star explores the real climax of the conflict from 2007 to 2014, which foreshadowed many aspects of modern counterinsurgencies, including the rise of the Islamic State, the importance of regional state and non-state actors, and the increasing use of social media as a recruitment tool. This series of articles will provide an overview of the game and its four factions, beginning here with the background context that led to the birth of the infamous Al-Shabaab jihadist group in South-Central Somalia. 

Somalia in the post-colonial era

Having gained its independence from British and Italian colonial rule in 1960, the young Somali Republic lived through a democratic decade that peaked with successful nationwide elections and the rise of several short-lived political parties. The hegemony of ethnic Somalis was both a blessing and a curse for the newly established nation: it would benefit the building of a common destiny beyond the differences between secular clans while also sowing the seeds of a destructive nationalism through the irredentist concept of a Greater Somalia. The borders of the new Republic were defined as those of the previous British and Italian colonial protectorates, leaving stranded ethnic Somali communities in neighboring Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Kenya.

After the assassination of the country’s second President Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke in October 1969, a coup led by General Siad Barre would see Somalia enter a new political era. First marked by Soviet-sponsored state socialism, it quickly transitioned to rule by a military junta led by Barre. In 1977 the dictator launched an initially successful, large-scale offensive to capture the Ogaden region of eastern Ethiopia, in an attempt to bolster his grip on power and gain popularity by realizing the Greater Somalia project. However, Barre saw his dreams crushed by Moscow’s support for the Ethiopian Derg (another young Socialist regime seen as more valuable than Somalia’s), and a harsh Ethio-Cuban counteroffensive that promptly ended the war the following year (this war features prominently in the recently released Twilight Struggle: Red Sea). This event put opposing Somali irredentism among the top of Ethiopia’s national priorities for years to come, right up to the modern era.

Despite this defeat, Barre successfully remained at the helm of Somalia for another fifteen years. But the defeat also highlighted the junta’s weaknesses and prompted its eventual demise through the rise of Ethiopian backed opposition groups. As a result, the country suffered another decade of harsh rule punctuated by internal purges, which peaked with the forgotten genocide of the northern Isaaq clan between 1987 and 1989. 

In 1991, the weakened dictatorship was overthrown by the various clan-led militias that shared what was left of the national territory, while the Isaaq-run Somaliland state promptly declared its independence.  The Somali Civil War began when, without a sense of unity, the now ruling warlords waged bloody struggles among themselves, turning the capital Mogadishu into a living hell that contrasted with its previously earned title “the pearl of the Indian Ocean”.  In the countryside, the power vacuum and the failure of impotent local leader led to a disastrous humanitarian crisis that prompted two successive United Nations-led interventions: UNOSOM I and II.

While the international community succeeded in preventing a significant death toll from the famine, they failed to improve the political situation. Instead, the infamous “Black Hawk Down” incident caused a Western withdrawal and the continuation of warlordism and its perpetual state of war. The high profile US disaster, highlighted in movie theaters by Ridley Scott a few years later, shaped international public perception of two significant consequences that the civil war led to: the rise of Islamist cells within the country and the developing phenomenon of Somali piracy (both of which are featured in the game and will be the focus of future articles).

Some important Civil War sub-actors

During his Sudanese exile in the 1990s, infamous Saudi jihadist leader Osama bin Laden built and supported a network of militant organizations all over Africa, from Algiers to Addis Ababa. This period peaked with the bombings of US Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam that caused hundreds of casualties, sparked international outrage, and resulted in an American cruise missile response in Afghanistan and Khartoum weeks later.

Bin Laden also promoted the rise of an Islamist-Somali movement: Al-Itihaad al-Islamiya (AIAI). First active in the Ethiopian Ogaden region (the very same one Siad Barre attempted to seize two decades earlier), the organization waged a low-scale guerrilla war in the area, but it also maintained training camps on the other side of the border in Somalia and played a support role in the aforementioned terrorist attacks against American interests. While AIAI itself had little to no impact on the actual course of the Somali Civil War, several of its members would join bin Laden in exile in Afghanistan. They were to become the future cadres of yet another Islamist organization that would eventually play a major role in Somalia: Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen.

In the meantime, the international community’s attempts to support a reconciliation effort in Somalia failed one after another. This power vacuum allowed alternative actors ranging from warlords to local clans to autonomously rule over their respective chunks of the Horn of Africa. However, they certainly did not exert the same military power as the former dictatorship. Without an actual navy to defend the national waters, the coastline quickly became prey to foreign fishing trawler fleets that illegally plundered the offshore fish reserves. As early as 2004, local coastal communities promptly reacted by boarding the foreign vessels and levying “taxes” at gunpoint. In the de-facto autonomous northern state of Puntland, the provincial government soon officially employed these improvised coast guard squads by attaching them to the Ministry of Fisheries. A ”fishing permit” system, exacerbated by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the impact of the civil war on Somali society, attracted hundreds of volunteers. This movement would soon depart from its initial goal of protecting fishing to devolve into an actual mass wave of hijacking, including of cruise ships and trade-related vessels – the ‘golden age’ of Somali piracy had begun.

The Islamic Courts Union and the 2006 Ethiopian Invasion

The civil war reached a stalemate between all parties until 2006. As part of the global War on Terror, the CIA secretly reached out to powerful warlords in Mogadishu, forming the “Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism” and employing them to capture and transfer potential jihadist VIPs residing in Somalia. These jihadist figures were believed to have found a new organization to hide within: the Islamic courts. Local communities and businessmen supported these unofficial tribunals to bring back justice and order in areas that warlords failed to manage, through the application of Islamic law (sharia). Boosted by their widespread acclaim, the courts quickly banded together, and their patrons provided the armed manpower to protect these new institutions. The nascent effort to form a national system led to the rise of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) and created tensions with the local armed bands. Over a few months in 2006, the ICU defeated the very unpopular warlords in Mogadishu, and after their victory in the capital, expanded all over Southern Somalia. 

This evolution in the theater grabbed the attention of the Ethiopian government and the weak Somalia Transitional Federal Government initiative that it was hosting. The prospect of its neighbor becoming united under an Islamic banner, backed by its Eritrean rival, prompted a quick response in July 2006 when Ethiopian forces, followed by friendly Somali militias, crossed the border. The better-equipped Ethiopian forces swiftly dislodged the ICU militias without much fighting. By December, the ICU-affiliated leaders had fled to Eritrea, leaving Mogadishu free for the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) to be installed in, now recognized by the international community.

However, not all branches of the ICU gave up the fight. One of its more radical wings, known for its militant’s relatively average young age, quickly gained traction by waging a violent insurgency against the Ethiopian occupation: al-Shabaab (the Youth) had finally entered the scene. At the same time a UN-sanctioned, African Union-mandated Ugandan contingent under the label of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) also entered Somalia. Numbering a few thousand men based in the capital’s airport, their mission was to protect the TFG and stabilize the country, a task that would prove bloody and perilous in the years to come.

All protagonists were now in place for the military climax of the Somali Civil War: a determined and militant Islamist movement, an international coalition, a feeble transitional government, and stranded fragments of the civil society that seek to exploit the power vacuum. International eyes would also soon be drawn to the most significant rise in world maritime piracy since the 17th century Golden Age of Piracy. In the next article, we’ll look deeper into the Al-Shabaab organization and inspect the bloody but often successful tactics that it implemented to achieve its significant territorial gains.

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